Tinker to Evers to Chance Challenge: Collect these six cards featuring history’s most famous double play combination.

Here we pay tribute to three of the game’s greats, the trio of infielders who gained immortality as decade-long mates with the Cubs before each went on to his own renown, celebrated in the Diamond Heads portrayals for Joe Tinker (Chicago Feds,) Johnny Evers (Boston Braves,) and Frank Chance (Yankees.) Tinker found fame leading the renegade Chicago entry in the Federal League to a title in 1915. Evers played and managed the Braves to their miraculous 1914 comeback and Series sweep. Chance left the Cubs as the highest-paid player in MLB and went on to leave his managerial impact on major and minor league clubs.

Each man suffered personal adversity during and after their years with the Cubs. Chance took too many pitches to the head, resulting in life-threatening blood clots in his brain. Evers broke a leg, perhaps costing the team its final title in 1910. Evers and Tinker later went broke, returning to baseball from economic calamity

In 1946, Cooperstown’s Veterans Committee assured the three would enter baseball immortality entwined as one, the double-play combo for the ages, swept upon the inspired doggerel of Franklin Pierce Adams

Adams’ 8-line poem, Baseball’s Sad Lexicon, was originally published in the New York Evening Mail on July 12, 1910 under the title That Double Play Again

In 1946, Adams wrote of the poem: “I wrote that double play thing for the New York Evening Mail in July 1910. I was the only Cub rooter in the Polo Grounds press box. I wrote that piece because I wanted to get out to the game, and the foreman of the composing room at the Mail said I needed 8 lines to fill. The next day (an editor) said that no matter what else I ever wrote, I would be known as the guy that wrote those 8 lines. And they weren’t much good, at that.”

Research suggests that the combination turned only 54 double plays in 770 games played together

Following an onfield fistfight between Tinker and Evers in 1905, some reports claim that the two didn’t speak to each other for another 33 years. However, they did perform a theatrical routine together for a 10 week stretch in 1929